This was our second Rammstein show, which brought us to over 16,000 km in round trip flights to Dallas and Montreal in 2017 and 2022. This time we knew the weather was going to be ill-timed, but after a 5 year span that included 3 years of holding tickets for the Canadian home turf show, we didn’t care. And it rained. Hard. Really hard. But we baby stepped through the drip-pissing trees, splashed hesitantly up to the slowly sinking ticket tents and slogged through the shoe-killing muck and muddy rivers of thunderflood to revel in the strangely familiar Industrio-GothChurch Of Rammstein! And so it came to pass. But not quite in the way we had come to expect. Let’s blame it on the Rain? Techs seemed to be having some difficulties. But the skies brightened and Die Große Dunkle Felsenkirche stood in regal silence against the late sunset, with it’s pointy metal Expo 67 sidekick “Trois disques”poised and ready to rock. Excitement grew as the countdown (we miss that ol’ 2017 countdown) began. But German precision failed! Nein! The show did not begin! Instead, we were made to Wait an Extra Hour while listening to mellow piano versions of Rammstein songs and worrying that the lingering clouds were going to douse the whole event. Ouch. What an enormous letdown. The duo was excellent, but, seriously? After all those years of waiting, we got that instead of Rammstein? Maybe the techs were still investigating the water damage… Fair enough. What makes a live show interesting and Fun is that you never know what might happen! The real show finally began, and—as always—we marched and sang and oohed and awed and yelled and felt the heat blasts from the towers and cheered our voices raw all night. It was the biggest crowd we’d ever seen (43,000?), the loudest (and most beautiful-sounding) PA we have ever heard (x1 million?) and the most stylishly creative and choreographed lighting/staging this side of Alpha Centauri (consciousness may need rehab). All the instruments sounded great. The guitar sounds were monumentally cool.
Fun facts:
-There was a wildly impromptu “GooseZone” occupied by french-speaking urban birds!
-The intermission crowd-cam made for some hilariously improvised antics involving male and female breasts.
You had to be there!